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Tuesday, 8 March 2016

Curating ISTE2016 Data... Some Suggestions

This time last year I watched a
BBC News interview with formidable startup lady Ramona Peirson who was being interviewed for International Women's Day. I tuned in on the interview so I could let the Minority Women in Tech #DigiDiverse
#SXSWEdu presenters know about how Ramona was taking on Silicon Valley and
Technology's Man Problem on... And was winning!

Today's post involves these same two groups as I thought I'd provide an update on my
attempts to curate data from events like #SXSWEdu and ISTE 12 months after being introduced to this awesome team.

In the closing ISTE2015 keynote, Josh Stumpenhorst implored educators not to let the enthusiasm, the excitement, the wonderment dissolve on the plane ride back to 'normal life'

This is a sentiment that I agree with (But also one where I know how and why it's easy to have this excitement in a setting with like minded tech enthusiasts, but may be a little more challenging to do in "normal life"). To help to keep the ISTE excitement alive post conference I have tried to curate some of the links from ISTE so people can explore and to build on any
promising ideas back at the ranch in normal life..

During ISTE2015 I started to cuate conference data using the most promising
platform that I've found to date, Declara.

Through curating this data I found 5 posts that make the effort of trying to
organise all the links well worthwhile:

What's frustrating is wondering how many other links are being missed because
thousands of educators are sharing their great ideas at a pace that's simply too fast to curate in any meaningful way... never mind trying to consume in real time!

I started to curate some of the links that were shared during 2015 on Declara and when Ramona heard what I was trying to achieve, her and the team automated the
process for me. Obviously this was a fantastic development but, unfortunately, whether curating these links in excel (As I tried to do in 2013) or Declara last year... the data is
too big for one person to be able to curate and make sense of.

With the ISTE sessions going live and with the early bird prices being
available, I thought I'd do a little prep to try to figure this conundrum out,
which led to some interesting pre-conference findings.

Did you know that...

The session descriptions for the 1,053 ISTE sessions include 671,950 words and 3,112 links as well as a number of references to books and journal articles etc.

The session description for the 1,368 ISTE2015 sessions include 876,731 words and 3,454 links.

But how many of these links are duplicated? Which sites are the most
referenced? ...And how many delegates have explored the
details of all these session and all the fantastic background information that
the presenters have put together?

Kudos to Kevin Thomas, Pamela Redmond and Julie Lindsay who have been extremely thorough with their due diligence and have between 4,125 and 6,125 words for their sessions.

I've done this to try to figure out if and how Declara might be able to be used
to curate the ISTE2016 links.

As coincidence would have it, one potential solution might be what I did for Sarah Thomas
prior to the first Digital Diversity #SXSWEdu presentation.

When I heard about the presentation I mentioned that I'd read about a few
studies that helped to raise the grades for minorities as well as some of the
issues around technology's "Man Problem" as the New York Times article above calls it. I shared these resources with Sarah, and believe that some of the material was
incorporated into the presentation.

During the three days of ISTE there will be so many links that are shared that
it will be difficult to keep up, what if we spread this out a little bit?

Could any material that might be overlooked because of all the noise be shared
earlier, which may even be incorporated into the presentation?
Could this lead to developing a relationship with the presenter and other
attendees before the event?

Could this lead to more people attending the session?If any post-session blog posts that were written about the session were all in the same place lead to
more speaking engagements for the presenters?Could the Declara collections I've curated help convince admins and superintendents to cover the costs of educators going to ISTE? How and why might this be the case? Let's ask Atari Founder, Nolan Bushnell:"Too often, I hear about companies that frown on their employees spending time online. Pay attention to your work! Don't get caught up in the Internet trap!

This is wrong.

Your creatives cannot spend all their time focused on the one creative problem you want them to solve. The more their minds are allowed to roam, the more likely their creative juices are to flow.One of the best ways to do this is to encourage random walks through Wikipedia...Wikipedia enables you to look up new and different topics around the one you're struggling with.

Say you're thinking about abstract art for a marketing project. You then see a link to visual language, which you've never thought about before. That leads you to Gestalt psychology, which in turn leads you to cybernetics. The next stop is artificial intelligence, and suddenly you see a new way to create an ad campaign based on theories that you hadn't considered until you traveled your random wiki path" ...Let your creatives open up the clouds of possibilities around any project by encouraging them to walk randomly through Wikipedia" Nolan Bushnell, Finding the Next Steve Jobs
For any delegates of ISTE2013 then this will sound a lot like Steve Johnstons "Slow Hunches" from his "Where Ideas Come From" research and keynote.

NB I am bearing Nolan and Steve's comments and research in mind as I curate this data and hope that people who will be attending a session and who check out the background links might also see which other collections the article features in, this (hopefully) will lead to them connecting with educators as well as industry experts who have a shared interest in the topic.

I don't know the answer to the questions above. What I do know is that there are
so many links shared during the 3 day period makes any attempt to consume or curate the
information a challenge.

There may also be few people who check through all the
background links, the Declara format may mean that people may spend an hour or
two scrolling down this collection and reading other people's insights... to "Encourage people to take a random walk through ISTE2016 session background research"

After curating these links I know that, if I were attending the conference this year, there would be a few sessions that I'd attend as a result of this background information which I may not have had a huge interest in based on a cursory glance at the top line session description.

I also know that you can't have duplicate links in a Declara Collection but you can see who else has collected a link, so new connections can be made
through sharing an article.

I'm going to be breaking these collections down into 1,053 collections based on
each ISTE2016 session and would welcome the presenters to either co-create or take
ownership of these collections and to see if and how we can organise these ISTE2016 links.

I've no idea where this might lead but one thing is for sure is that, whether in an excel speadsheet (as it was in 2013),
as a large single Declara collection or as 1,000 smaller collections, I won't be
able to curate this on my own.

Once this has been organised it might set things up nicely to provide an infrastructure to both curate all the data that's shared during ISTE2016 and organise it in a way that allows us to bottle up the enthusiasm, the excitement, the wonderment of the event when attendees return to the classroom.

Anyone have any thought on this? Anyone feel like helping curate this data? www.Declara.com

PS Are you presenting or attending ISTE? Want some help with travel costs? Check out #Get2ISTE Rides Again